Hair care is important for reasons other than just appearance. While healthy looking locks are aesthetically appealing, it is also an important aspect of one's overall physical maintenance regimen, just like skins and eyes. Human hairs have large mass of fibers serving to catch soil from the surrounding environment. Added to this is sebum, the natural oil that is released onto the hair at its base from the sebaceous gland of each follicle. Hair care products, such as shampoo and conditioner, are designed to remove dirt and soil and then condition the hair. As people wash their hair more frequently, sebum rarely coats the whole length of the hair fibers, resulting in high demand for better hair conditioning form of the shampoo and/or conditioner.
The detersive effect of shampoo comes from surfactants that are capable of bringing hydrophobic wastes to the aqueous phase to be washed away. A majority of such surfactants are either sulfates or long chain carboxylates of metal salts. Existing technologies focus on synthetic surfactants that rely heavily on petrochemicals and other chemicals. Synthetic materials for hair care products not only are environmentally unfriendly but also are harsh to skins. Natural surfactants are better alternatives to synthetic ones. U.S. Pat. No. 8,557,311 [1] discloses a natural surfactant derived from gynostemma extract that can be used as surfactant/cleaning agent/emulsifier/foaming agent. It claims that such an extract has distinctive surface tension altering functions, which reduce the surface tension of aqueous solutions and allow foam formation and emulsification with oil, dirt and other water insoluble substances.
The main aim of the shampoo is to remove dirt and soil. Conditioners are applied either separately after shampoo or together with shampoo, such as in the 2-in-1 products. After applying the conditioners, a short time, for example, thirty seconds to a couple of minutes, is required before rinsing the conditioners out. The stay time allows the primary conditioning agents including quaternized surfactants, cationic polymers, to be bound to the hair such that it is left behind on the surface of the hair to provide the protection. In practice, the faster the bounding, the shorter time is required for the conditioner to stay before rinsed out, and the more convenient is for the user. The current synthetic compositions require around one to ten minutes to complete the bounding.
Improvements are needed in seeking natural ingredients for healthier hair care products and compositions that shorten the stay-time requirement for the hair care products.